CASE 137 / Dossier 137 (Dominik Moll, France, 2025, 115 minutes)
Case 137, French filmmaker Dominik Moll's second fact-based procedural in a row, represents the director--in collaboration with co-writer Gilles Marchand--at the top of his game.
His César Award-winning docudramaThe Night of the 12th was terrific, but this penetrating look at modern-day policing proves even more gripping, thanks in large part to César winner Léa Drucker's tough, yet tender performance as a single mother, daughter, and internal affairs investigator doing her best under unbelievably difficult circumstances (Drucker last appeared on Seattle screens in Catherine Breillat's Last Summer).
Unexpected bonus: Case 137 is a first-rate cat film. Highly recommended.
Argentinian filmmaker Lucio Castro's character study centers on Adnan (Laith Khalifeh), a handsome grad student open to new sexual experiences.
In the title chapter, he spends a summer internship at a Williamsburg art gallery. After dark, he frequents a cruising park until he clicks with Yariel (Joel Isaac), a delivery driver with limited English who proves poetic in Spanish. Connection established, things take an unexpected turn.
In other chapters, he enjoys upstate New York adventures with septuagenarian artist Sal (Ezriel Kornel) who creates erotic gay tapestries, and sexually-challenged lover Iggie (Matthew Risch). In the final chapter, Adnan finds a different kind of release. Castro's droll, sexually frank approach recalls Misericordia's Alain Guiraudie with more wonder, less menace.
I found this interview with the filmmaker particularly illuminating.
FRANZ (Agnieszka Holland, 2025, Czech Republic/Poland, 127 minutes)
A conventional biopic wouldn't suit the unconventional Franz Kafka, so Agnieszka Holland (Green Border, SIFF 2024) entwines narrative with nonfiction in a film as much about a Jewish family as a writer's career.
In the present, she explores the way Czechoslavakia has fetishized Kafka in contrast with his family's struggles, his complications with women, the illness that claimed him, and the persecution that devastated his survivors.
It isn't a happy story by any means, but Holland's multi-faceted method in concert with Idan Weiss's full-bodied performance honors a bizarre and brilliant artist who peeled back the layers of polite society to reveal the venality underpinning humanity--though quite entertainingly so!
Franz plays Sun, May 10, 5pm at SIFF Cinema Downtown.
Dates and times subject to change. Please see the festival site for the most up-to-date information. Images from Rotten Tomatoes (Léa Drucker in Case 137) and the IMDb (Laith Khalifeh and Matthew Risch in Drunken Noodles).
The 52nd edition of the Seattle International Film Festival begins on May 7 with writer/director Boots Riley's second feature, I Love Boosters, and ends with actor/director Olivia Wilde's third, The Invite, on May 17. My 2026 coverage begins with Mārama, one of the highlights of this year's lineup.
MARAMA
(Taratoa Stappard, New Zealand/UK, 2026, 89 minutes)
The lingering effects of colonialism take the form of terrifying visions in New Zealand filmmaker Taratoa Stappard's assured Gothic horror Mārama.
Stappard, who lives and works in London, begins in 1859 as Mary Stevens (Ariāna Osborne, who is of Ngaāti Mutunga and Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi descent), a 24-year-old Māori woman raised by a white family, arrives in Whitby, North Yorkshire from Wellington, where a surly coachman drops her off miles from the home of Thomas Boyd, a mystery man who reached out to her, paid for her trip, and promised to tell her about her birth parents.
The coachman warns that the path is steep, but doesn't offer to help her in any way, a sign that she isn't welcome as a woman, a non-white, and a foreigner. Mary is on her own with bulky luggage until Peggy (Jamaican-Scottish actress Umi Myers), a servant, arrives in a coach to bring her to Hawkser Manor, home of retired whaler Nathaniel Cole (an avuncular Toby Stephens), to rest for the night. They appear to have anticipated her visit.
Mary plans to leave the next day until Nathaniel, a widower, informs her that Thomas has died, and offers her a job as governess for his bright, inquisitive nine-year-old granddaughter, Anne (Evelyn Towersey).
The look on Mary's face suggests that she knows to question anything that comes out of a white man's mouth (Osborne says a lot without words). It's convenient that Thomas died during her 73-day trip, and that Nathaniel also grew up without parents. Plus, he's exceptionally eager to win her favor, claiming that he often hired Māori men to work on his ships and that he speaks the language. He even built a model Māori wharenui on his grounds.
Mary has no other option, though she senses that something isn't quite right with this picture, which Stappard indicates through the way seemingly innocuous moments–glances in mirrors, the touch of hands, the very sight of the wharenui–send a chill down her spine for reasons she can't explain.
The eerie sounds of tapping metal or rattling glass accompany these moments, leading to visions which grow more detailed each time they occur. In some, Māori women attempt to communicate with her. In others, her throat appears slashed as if a murdered woman's spirit has possessed her.
As Mary gets to know Anne, she finds that the girl also speaks Māori and has a similar birthmark on her arm, hints that her mother may have been Māori or that they may be related. Anne is only a child, but she's the closest thing Mary has to a confidant. Peggy, who lacks her educational advantages, resents her privilege, and Nathaniel's friends and associates creep her out, especially when they join together in a grotesque pageant to celebrate the birthday of the great white hunter.
Then, Nathaniel tells her about a woman from his past, and everything starts to make sense--and not in a good way--but Mary is resourceful and resolute, and she won't rest until she puts all of the pieces together.
In that sense, she recalls the Second Mrs. de Winter in Daphne Du Maurier's novel Rebecca--and Hitchcock's adaptation with Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier--who becomes a de facto detective in order to determine the truth about her secretive husband's late wife and his hostile housekeeper.
Right: Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson in Hitchcock's 1940 Rebecca
Unlike Mrs. de Winter, though--who lacks a first name--Mary is no shrinking violet. As the amateur theatrical comes to an end, she lets Nathaniel's guests know exactly how she feels. In Māori, of course, which most of them don't speak, but it's the first sign that her employer may not hold as many cards as he thinks he does.
For most of the film's run time, Mary keeps a tight lid on her emotions, but after her outburst, all bets are off. To Stephens' credit, he doesn't overplay his hand, possibly because Nathaniel doesn't see himself as a villain. He may value Māori culture, but he doesn't exactly value Māori people, other than as a means to an end. He can collect their art and speak their language, but they exist to serve his whims, and in the end: they're pretty expendable.
Stappard's directorial debut, the first in a proposed trilogy of Gothic horror stories, also brings the Victorian-era novels of the Brontë sisters to mind--particularly Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights--through the isolated setting, the severe costumes, the foreboding atmosphere, and the sort of handsome, brooding man who has convinced himself he knows everything there is to know about women. At his peril.
It's no surprise then when Mary finds her inner strength, since she never comes across as a victim, and since Stappard indicates that a showdown looms on the horizon with each slippery word Nathaniel utters and each startling vision that rattles Mary's equilibrium, but it's still supremely satisfying when she takes control of an impossible situation, not least since Ariāna Osborne's fury could melt the icecaps (like her father, television presenter Glen Osborne, she's a former rugby player).
Even for those who don't normally gravitate toward Gothic horror, Mārama is absolutely worth it just to see one woman right several generations' worth of wrongs with the sheer force of her will. If only it worked that way in real life.
For Crypticon this year, I moderated the panels on 1976 horror and 1986 horror. Thanks to the panelists for their great contributions, in addition to anyone who attended or suggested titles. If you see any key films missing, please feel free to let me know.
Due to the timing of the 1986 panel, I missed Tony Kay's interview with Adrienne Barbeau, an actress of whom I've been fond since her days on '70s sitcom Maude; our panel was fun, but that was still a bummer.
In alphabetical order, plus directors, notable cast, and a few notes. If I watched the film online, I've noted the streaming service in brackets.
THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF 1976 HORROR
Panelists: Daniel Gildark, Kennedy Rainer, and Becky Sayers
A-B
Alice, Sweet Alice (Alfred Sole) [Tubi]
Notable cast: Brooke Shields
Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter)
Baby Rosemary (John Hayes)
Bestialità / Dog Lay Afternoon (Peter Skerl)
Blood Sucking Freaks (Joel M. Reed) [Tubi]
Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis)[Tubi]
Notable cast: Bette Davis, Oliver Reed, Karen Black
Notable cast: Tony Lo Bianco, Silvia Sydney, Richard Lynch
The Grim Reaper (Ron Ormond)
Grizzly (William Girdler)
H-M
House of Mortal Sin (Pete Walker)
The House with Laughing Windows / La Casa Dalle Finestre che Ridono
(Pupi Avati) [Internet Archive]
J.D.'s Revenge (Arthur Marks)
Notable cast: Louis Gossett, Jr., Glynn Turman
The Legend of the Wolf Woman / Werewolf Woman (Rino Di Silvestro)
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Nicolas Gessner) [Tubi]
Notable cast: Jodie Foster, Martin Sheen
Mako: The Jaws of Death (William Grefé)
Massacre at Central High (Rene Dalder) [Tubi]
Notable cast: Andrew Stephens, Robert Carradine
O-S
The Omen (Richard Donner)
Notable cast: Gregory Peck, Lee Remick
Las Poquianchis (Felipe Cazals)
Satan's Black Wedding (Nick Millard)
Schizo (Pete Walker)
Squirm (Jeff Leiberman) [Tubi]
T-W
The Tenant (Roman Polanski)
Notable cast: Isabelle Adjani
To the Devil a Daughter (Peter Sykes) [Peacock]
Notable cast: Christopher Lee, Nastassja Kinski
The Town that Dreaded Sundown (Charles B. Pierce)
Who Can Kill a Child? / ¿Quién Puede Matar a un Niño?
(Chicho Ibáñez Serrador) [Prime]
The Witch Who Came from the Sea (Matt Cimber)
I didn't do any crowd-sourcing for the list above, but I did for the list below. I also found Kier-La Janisse's House of Psychotic Women helpful (I have the 2022 expanded edition). It's how I discovered the Polish film I Like Bats (Lubię Nietoperze), which I highly recommend to anyone looking for a funny, sexy, quasi-feminist take on the vampire myth. Janisse also included the film in her Severin boxed set House of Psychotic Women: Rarities Collection.
I follow a number of film critics on Bluesky, and Odie Henderson and Norm Wilner were both so enthusiastic about Night of the Creeps, that when I put out a call for 1986 horror recommendations, they shared their excellent reviews. Click their names for more. Sadly, I also missed the interview with star Tom Atkins, who is perfection in the film, because I was on the Pets in Horror panel. Granted, that was a fun one, too, and you can't do it all.
THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF 1986 HORROR
Panelists: Byron C. Miller, Sara Michelle Fetters, Kennedy Rainer, and Bri Cummings
A-B
Aliens (James Cameron)
Notable cast: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn
America 3000 (David Engelbach)
April Fools Day (Fred Walton) [Pluto]
Big Trouble in Little China (John Carpenter)
Notable cast: Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, James Hong
Black Roses (John Fasano)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch)
Notable cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini
C-D
Chopping Mall (Jim Wynorski)
Notable cast: Barbara Crampton, Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel, Dick Miller
The Clan of the Cave Bear (Michael Chapman)
Class of Nuke 'Em High (Richard W. Haines, Lloyd Kaufman)
Cobra (George P. Cosmatos)
Notable cast: Sylvester Stallone
Crawlspace (David Schmoeller)
Notable cast: Klaus Kinski
Crimewave (Sam Raimi)
Critters (Stephen Herek)[Tubi]
Notable cast: Dee Wallace, Billy Green Bush, Scott Grimes
Dead End Drive-In (Brian Trenchard-Smith)
Deadly Friend (Wes Craven)
Deadtime Stories (Jeffrey Delman)
Demons 2 (Lamberto Bava)
Dolls (Stuart Gordon)
E-G
Escapes (David Steensland)
Extremities (Robert M. Young)
F/X (Robert Mandel)
Fair Game (Mario Andreacchio)
The Fly (David Cronenberg)
Notable cast: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis
From Beyond (Stuart Gordon)
Notable cast: Barbara Crampton, Jeffrey Combs
The Golden Child (Michael Ritchie)
Gothic (Ken Russell)
Notable cast: Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Natasha Richardson
A BODY TO LIVE IN (Angelo Madsen, USA, 2026, 88 minutes)
The human body is an amazing thing. It does a lot, and it can take a lot. To quote those Timex television commercials of yesteryear, "It takes a licking, and keeps on ticking."
Filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist Angelo Madsen's central subject, Fakir Musafar, pulled, poked, prodded, pierced, and otherwise treated his body like clay or putty. Something to re-make/re-model. A toy. And a sacred object. But the former Roland Loomis wasn't simply trying to shock or to find sexual release–well, not completely–but to open his consciousness.
In the 1980s, the father of Modern Primitives--a catchall term for body modification–would reach a wider audience when RE/Search published the influential book Modern Primitives: Tattoo, Piercing, Scarification. In 1989, Seattle's Center on Contemporary Art mounted a popular exhibit inspired by the book (to quote LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, "I was there!").
Fakir provided this filmmaker and those authors with ample material since he documented his many and varied body mods, and his archive at UC Berkeley--my late father's employer--includes 13,400 photographs and 122 video files. Fittingly, Madsen avoids talking heads in favor of artfully-composed still images and hand-painted 16mm film along with evocative music and audio excerpts from interviews, creating an oral history effect.
I couldn't say whether Fakir's remarkable B&W images had an impact on transgressive photographers Robert Mapplethorpe or Joel-Peter Witkin, but it wouldn't surprise me. I do know for sure that his interest in corsetry inspired Mr. Pearl, corsetiere to the stars.
In his prime, Fakir also made talk show appearances where he alarmed normie audiences, while taking the opportunity to explain his practice in an unpretentious, matter-of-fact, midwestern dialect. It probably didn't hurt that the part-time poet had a master's in creative writing from San Francisco State University.
When dressed in a suit and a tie, Fakir looked like your average advertising executive with his open face, close-set eyes, neat hair, and untrendy spectacles--and he did, in fact, work in that field for several years.
From an early age, though, Fakir was fascinated by the strange. In rural South Dakota in the 1940s, that meant circus freaks and images from the pages of National Geographic magazine. He found these exotic people more relatable than his peers, though he would find his tribe when he moved to San Francisco after the Korean War. For a time, that tribe included Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, who he knew best as a musician.
Madsen spoke to others who worked with or took inspiration from Fakir, like Modern Primitives coauthor V. Vale, body piercer Jim Ward, adult film performer Annie Sprinkle, and Fakir's wife, BDSM practitioner Cléo Dubois, who rejected her mother's Nazi ideology as a young woman, fled France, and ended up in the City by the Bay where she too would find her tribe.
Fakir could handle most everything he did to his body. AIDS, however, would decimate his community in the 1980s (though he identified as gay at a perilous time, he emerged unscathed from the worst of the epidemic). He also faced accusations of cultural appropriation, which he did--or did not--handle well. Madsen leaves it up to viewers to decide. Fakir never expected his Arabic stage name to stick, for instance, but it did.
He also claimed that he learned about the Sun Dance, a Native American ceremony that can involve ritual piercing, while growing up on a Sioux Reservation, which is probably true, but it doesn't change the fact that he was a white man shaping a sacred indigenous rite to his own purposes.
I'm reminded of the Richard Harris western, A Man Called Horse, in which the Sioux abduct and eventually initiate a British man in a similar manner. Hard to believe the film was so popular that it spawned two sequels–and encouraged my high school history teacher to screen it in class (if given a choice, I would've preferred Arthur Penn's more playful Little Big Man).
For Fakir, who lived a full life by any standard, time ran out in 2018. He had made it to 87, seemingly none-too-worse for wear.
Madsen doesn't go into detail about his precautions around piercing and other potentially risky procedures, but it's clear that he took care, and remained as active as possible until lung cancer took its toll.
Fakir did not fear death, though, because he had been preparing for it his whole life. His body was spent, and now he could become pure spirit.
Madsen doesn't answer every question about the man, but he honors his practice and presents it from his thoughtful and, yes, loving perspective.
5/2/26 update: The film will screen today as planned, but the in-person Q&A was cancelled as the director won't be able to make it to Seattle.
MOTHER MARY (David Lowery, USA, 2026, 112 minutes)
When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me –Lennon-McCartney (mostly McCartney), "Let It Be" (1970)
Mother Mary, David Lowery's third for the studio, plays like a parody of an A24 film. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it isn't a great one either.
Lowery's latest is stylish as hell, but the writer/director/editor mistakes ponderousness for intensity and repetition for incantation. He's played with these elements before, but to more successful effect, particularly in 2021's The Green Knight, his mesmerizing adaptation of a 14-century text.
Though it's something new for him, since pop stars aren't his usual purview, his eighth feature feels like a mashup of other films in which woman is pitted against woman and bodies are pushed to the limit, especially Showgirls, The Black Swan,The Neon Demon, and Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria remake.
Left: Oscar winner Natalie Portman in Darren Aronofsky's The Black Swan
Lowery would also appear to have some familiarity with Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy, which depicts a world without men, and In Fabric, which revolves around a red dress with a rather insidious mind of its own (there are male dancers in Mother Mary, but they don't say a word).
Anne Hathaway plays the title character, an American pop star eager to make a dazzling return to the stage after an unfortunate incident in the recent past, and Michaela Cole plays Brit Sam Anselm, her former costume designer. For reasons never made clear, the performer abandoned the designer en route to superstardom. Sam was the friend and collaborator who knew her best, so this seems like a self-defeating move on Mother Mary's part, but that's Lowery's point: along the way, she lost herself.
Fair enough, but who is she, really? Hathaway gives it her all, but the part is woefully underwritten. It doesn't help that she's limited to a stage name--as if she never had a real one--while Sam has the advantage of authenticity.
Nor does Lowery do as much with all the Catholic iconography as he could. The Biblical name recalls Madonna, who was raised Catholic--as was Lady Gaga--and there's also a halo headpiece and a palm wound, but there's no talk of religion. Nor is there any information about her background, relationship status, or sexual orientation.
I believe it's intentional, but that doesn't mean it adds up.
Mother Mary is, for instance, curiously sexless. Granted, some pop star films, like Performance and Pink Floyd - The Wall, take that kind of thing pretty far--especially where drugged-out male stars and female groupies are concerned--but these ladies might as well be asexual. Sam's dialogue suggests that she and Mother Mary once had a thing, or felt a certain attraction, but who's to say. With her cutting remarks, which grow tiring after a while, Sam comes across as a spurned lover, but the lack of sexual tension between the two suggests that any relationship was in her head.
Instead, Lowery posits that the two have a supernatural connection represented by--wait for it--a red dress. When "The Red Woman," as he terms it, makes her debut crumpled up at the foot of Sam's bed, she recalls the creature in Possession, an inspiration the filmmaker has confirmed, except the reference diminishes his film by comparison, though those unfamiliar with Żuławski's baroque monsterpiece may feel otherwise.
It's a cliché that pop stars abandon the people who helped to make them famous, and it really happens--and will keep happening as long as we have pop stars--but the trick is to do something intriguing with the concept. Unfortunately, there's too much buildup here, and not enough payoff.
Once Lowery establishes that Mother Mary and Sam have a psychic bond, there's nowhere left to go. Though he incorporates elements of self-destructive body horror, which may be strictly metaphorical, the ending suggests that it's better to accept your demons than to deny them.
Good idea in theory, but after Sam's cruel words and Mother Mary's red-rimmed regrets, I expected more than the equivalent of a pep talk. I also expected more from Coel and Hathaway, but they're boxed in by one-note characters. From start to finish, Sam is bitter and Mother Mary is contrite.
The designer's unwillingness to accept the singer's apologies, which seem sincere, makes her less sympathetic as the film goes on--she twists the knife further by insisting she never listened to Mother Mary's music--not least since she appears to have done just fine on her own. Her connection to a superstar likely helped her to secure seed funding and to attract deep-pocketed clients. She's also surrounded by other self-possessed women, like Hilda (Euphoria's Hunter Schafer), her attentive and efficient assistant. Sam isn't as isolated as Mother Mary, but for whatever reason, she's just as lonely.
It's also unfortunate that the other performers have so little to do; I found it particularly disappointing vis-à-vis Sian Clifford, such a fine foil for Phoebe Waller-Bridge on Fleabag and a star of her own in the upcoming Lady.
Granted, FKA twigs, who contributed a song--"My Mouth Is Lonely for You"--has one showy scene where she conjures up a spirit before disappearing, but model Kaia Gerber mostly just stands around looking like a model.
If the entire film took place in Sam's under-lit, barn-like atelier, it might be an unbearable slog, but Lowery frequently cuts away to scenes of Mother Mary in concert, and Hathaway impresses with her solid singing, sure-footed dancing–particularly in the expressive sequence in which Sam commands her to enact the choreography for "Spooky Action" in silence–and enviably-toned legs. (Costume designer Bina Daigeler, a favorite of Pedro Almodóvar, clearly took cues from Taylor Swift's leg-lengthening stage looks.)
The other songs, written and produced by Charli xcx and Jack Antonoff, aren't the most memorable, but they go down easy, and the album, Mother Mary: Greatest Hits, holds up fine when divorced from the outré visuals.
After the triumph of Steven Soderbergh's The Christophers, I was looking forward to watching Michaela Cole go head to head with another locked-in performer, but Mother Mary doesn't strike the same sparks. It's more of an audiovisual feast with a few eye-catching frocks, but the broad-strokes characterizations leave the whole thing feeling a little threadbare.
Mother Mary opens on Thurs, April 23, nationwide and in the Seattle area at AMC and Regal theaters. Images from A24 via Indiewire (Anne Hathaway), Fox Searchlight Pictures / The Hollywood Reporter (Natalie Portman), Phantasmag (Hathaway and Michaela Cole), Inverse (Coel with "The Red Woman"), and Eric Zachanowich via AP / Hartford Courant (Coel).
Here's the most recent list I compiled for Crypticon.
As with most previous lists, I started with a preliminary list before turning to social media to crowd-source for more. I'm grateful to everyone who contributed suggestions.
What counts: cats, dogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, rabbits, rats, etc.
What doesn't: chickens, cows, horses, pigs, and other farm animals.
What about invertebrates? Furry mammals preferred!
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (Ernest Dickerson, 1995)
Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (John Harrison, 1990)
David Johansen fights a cat!
They Only Kill Their Masters (James Goldstone, 1972)
The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
Jed, the Siberian Husky
The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (Eli Craig, 2010)
U-Z
The Uncanny (Matthew Leutwyler, 2015)
The Uninvited (Thomas and Charles Guard, 2009)
The Voices (Marjane Satrapi, 2014)
When Evil Lurks (Demián Rugna, 2023)
Killer Mastiff
White God (Kornél Mundruczó, Hungarian, 2014)
The Wrath of Becky (Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote, 2023)
Willard (Daniel Mann, 1971)
Ben, the rat, pictured above left with Bruce Davison as Willard
The Crypticon Seattle panel Good Boy! (Pets in Horror) takes place on Sat, May 2, at 3pm with moderator Brien Gorham and panelists Todd Johnston, Eric Li, and me. Click here for tickets and more information.
Please see this list at the Scariest Things for more details about some of these films. Images from Bloody Disgusting (Sigourney Weaver with Jonesy in Alien), The Guardian (Indy in Good Boy), and the IMDb (Willard poster).
THE CHRISTOPHERS (Steven Soderbergh, 2025, UK, 100 minutes)
Someday, everything is gonna be diff’rent When I paint my masterpiece –Bob Dylan (1971)
The Christophers is a film about art and commerce, and the ways in which they're at cross purposes. It's also Steven Soderbergh's second London film in a row after last year's stylish Black Bag with Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as married intelligence officers, and the city suits him well.
Granted, the two films don't have much in common, other than that they aim to keep you guessing from start to finish, except the former is a romantic thriller, in the vein of 1998's Out of Sight, whereas The Christophers isn't a thriller at all, though it doesn't lack for low-key thrills.
Lori Butler (Michaela Cole, whose sculptural face is a work of art), an exacting woman in her thirties, works as a food cart vendor. She isn't miserable necessarily, but her life hasn't turned out the way she imagined.
One day, from out of the blue, she gets a call from a former art school classmate with an offer she can't refuse--even if it makes her queasy.
Sallie (Baby Reindeer's Jessica Gunning) and her brother, Barnaby (a perfectly-cast James Corden in a ridiculous patchwork shirt), would like her to complete The Christophers, their elderly father's famously unfinished third series of paintings under that name. Completed canvases in the previous series have sold exceptionally well, and this one will be worth even more after he kicks the bucket. They describe it as a restoration job--Lori has a sideline in art restoration--except they're really asking her to engage in forgery. They figure she won't mind, since he once humiliated her in public.
Their father, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen in top form) is retired and in declining health, so they plan to pass Lori off as an assistant, so she can gain access to The Christophers and finish them using his original paints and brushes. They neglect to tell her that he can't stand them, and considering that they see him primarily as a flesh-and-blood ATM machine, it isn't hard to see why (to be fair, he also appears to have been a pretty lousy father).
While Lori lives in shared housing with other struggling artists, Julian lives in two side-by-side walk-ups in Fitzrovia filled with art and the detritus of a long life. When they first meet, he doesn't appear to remember her from their long-ago encounter. In fact, it's unclear whether he's eccentric or suffering from dementia. He's sharp in some ways, less so in others.
Lori makes herself useful, though she finds him exhausting. He's so verbose and inappropriately revealing, she can't get a word in edgewise, though she soaks up every detail. The actors generate a palpable friction, while the characters have only their passion for art in common. That's about it. The tension isn't about age or race, but sensibility, since she's a 21st-century woman, while he clings to the politically-incorrect norms of the past.
In a way, though, they're both acting. As Ed Solomon's twisty screenplay continues, he doles out more and more details about two people who aren't as different from each other as they at first appear. Not least because Julian isn't as oblivious as he seems; he's also convinced that his kids had an ulterior motive in hiring Lori. He's not sure what it is, but he suspects that it involves The Christophers, so when he asks her to burn them in the firepit, it's hard to tell if he's testing her--to see if she'll resist--or whether he simply wants them out of his life for reasons that will be revealed later.
In a manner of speaking, the film is a cat and mouse game, because Lori and Julian have clashing interests and intentions, though they both prove pretty proficient at subterfuge. It's one of the film’s biggest strengths: they're intelligent people, and Solomon, who wrote Soderbergh's terrific Detroit gangster picture No Sudden Move, assumes you are, too. Granted, he's also known for Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Men in Black, and there's plenty of snap and crackle to the screwball-adjacent dialogue.
Solomon also doesn't believe in giving everything away. Julian had a wife and children at a time when many gay men, even those in London's artistic demimonde, lived outwardly as heterosexuals (prior to 1967's Sexual Offences Act, homosexuality was essentially illegal in the UK). He considers it a badge of pride that he was bisexual "when it actually cost you something," though I suspect he was as "bisexual" as Elton John in the 1970s, i.e. not very. We never find out Lori's sexual orientation.
And nor does it matter.
Lori's feelings about art matter more, and over the years, she went from being a Julian admirer to a critic as he squandered his talent, but at least he had some, whereas she specializes in convincingly copying other artists. It's a skill to be sure, but it isn't exactly art--not even by her own standards.
For all their differences, though, they're lonely in their own unique ways, but not enough to admit that they would rather have a worthy opponent with whom to spar than an assortment of unworthies. If they never become friends in the conventional sense, they become something just as valuable.
Wikipedia describes The Christophers as a black comedy. I wouldn't, though the back-and-forth is frequently quite funny, and rarely in an obvious way.
Sometimes Coel, who plays a fairly humorless character, gets a laugh simply by the way Lori reacts--or doesn't react--to her employer's shameless proclamations and his children's slippery prevarications. Her performance here is nothing like the work she did in her brightly-hued council estate comedy Chewing Gum, though never as dark as anything in I May Destroy You, her Emmy Award-winning exploration into life after sexual assault.
As different as those characters and those projects were, I would imagine Coel wrote them to her strengths–Chewing Gum was an extension of her 2012 one-woman play–whereas in the case of The Christophers, she excels as a once-promising artist stuck in as much of a rut as her 86-year-old sort-of mentor, though I don't believe Solomon wrote the role with her in mind.*
And I don't know if he wrote Julian with Ian McKellen in mind, but it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role, since he gets to use most every color in his considerable paintbox. It's been over a decade since I last saw him on the screen--in Bill Condon's touching Mr. Holmes--so he looks older than I remember, but there's a delightful sequence towards the end in which he rubs his hands together and skips about with glee, and I was reminded that he once appeared as a jaunty vampire in a Pet Shop Boys video.
By the end of the film, which never feels too stagey thanks to Soderbergh's deft direction and fluid camera work--as alter ego Peter Andrews--I was reminded of two other British two-handers, Harold Pinter's adaptation of Robin Maugham's The Servant and Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, even if this relationship isn't quite that antagonistic, though similar differentials are at play involving income, status, and ability (and McKellen appeared with Anthony Hopkins in Richard Eyre's BBC version of The Dresser in 2015).
The Christophers, however, isn't a tragedy. Sometimes a younger person can serve as a mentor or teacher as effectively as an older one, and sometimes the most challenging relationships can prove the most beneficial; the kind in which another person forces you to face the thing you least want to face--the thing you most need to face--and that will set you free in the end.
Once upon a time I assumed, like Lori, that I would become a professional artist. It didn't happen. I had bills to pay, and art wasn't going to get the job done. It doesn't happen for many people, but it made me particular about how art and artists are represented on screen, and Soderbergh's film, by way of Solomon's screenplay--as embodied by two terrific actors--is one of the best I've seen about the challenges and satisfactions of a life in art.
The Christophers opens at AMC Alderwood Mall on Sun, April 12, and SIFF Cinema Uptown on Thurs, April 16. Images from Blex Media (Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel), Film Streams (Jessica Gunning and James Corden), First Showing (McKellen) and Rotten Tomatoes (McKellen and Coel).
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is former president of Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
In other chapters, he enjoys upstate New York adventures with septuagenarian artist Sal (Ezriel Kornel) who creates erotic gay tapestries, and sexually-challenged lover Iggie (Matthew Risch). In the final chapter, Adnan finds a different kind of release. Castro's droll, sexually frank approach recalls Misericordia's Alain Guiraudie with more wonder, less menace.
